Article: reconciliation hard if crime not just buried, but purged

PanARMENIAN.Net - Touching stories about reconciliation are not hard to find. Germans and Jews helping each other, Israelis and Palestinians playing music together. These types of stories are possible, in part, because both sides start from acknowledgment of atrocity and understand that violence slowly kills the perpetrator, too, says an article on The Seattle Times.

It’s harder when the crime is not just buried, but purged. How can you seek reconciliation when your enemy believes, and insists that you do, too, that there’s nothing to reconcile? It’s tough, as journalist Meline Toumani, the author of memoir “There Was and There Was Not,” discovered, the article says.

As an Armenian American, she had nowhere to turn when she wanted to explore the divide between Armenians and Turks, still gaping a century after the murder of more than 1 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The Turkish government has never officially acknowledged a genocide. Throwing the word around freely violates the country’s penal code, under the charge of “insulting Turkishness.” National census records do not match those of the Armenian clergy. The planned elimination of an entire group does not exist in textbooks. Rather than continue to hate, “I wanted to understand what drove Turks to cling to their view,” she states in the book’s opening chapter, the article says.

Toumani, whose family came to the U.S. from Iran, was steeped in genocide lore. Her family did not patronize Turkish businesses or eat Turkish food. “Turk” was a term of derision. In fact, it “was a very long time” before she realized that none of her grandparents was among those captured and shot, or among those who perished in the horrific death marches of 1915. Yet, “The villain, for me, had always been the Turk. It was time to try to understand him,” she decided.

“There Was and There Was Not” is her chronicle of what was intended as an eight-week trip to Turkey but became a two-year stay in which she careened from one surreal encounter to another. She spent time with other outcasts, such as Armenian journalists (one of whom was murdered) and Kurds. Modern, younger Turks were puzzling to her. A Turkish acquaintance said he didn’t need to know anything about the Armenian genocide; in his eyes, if the government denied the slaughter, that meant the opposite — that it actually happened. And he didn’t need to delve any further. The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara presented an even bigger puzzle. Toumani gaped at a timeline of 3,000 years of human settlement ... with no mention of Armenians whatsoever. The trip could no longer be about why something happened, but whether.

This could have easily become a mawkish more-feelings-than-facts story. Toumani’s reportorial approach, laced with healthy skepticism, elevates it. She shares a deeply personal point of view, but an accessible thread of geopolitics and history is woven throughout, the article says.

Before setting out on her first trip to Turkey, she makes a naive wish list: “I would learn to speak Turkish, and I would meet with Turks from all walks of life, and I believed — truly believed — that if I spoke to them in a certain way ... I would be able to make some sort of breakthrough.”

There is no happy ending here, the article says. Toumani is unsparing in her reactions to Turks and Armenians alike. At the end of her trip, she truthfully recounts she was weary of what it took to “pass” in Istanbul; rather than widening her horizons, her background had constricted them. She couldn’t meet people simply as human beings. If they did not deny the past outright, they were too carefully insisting that she was the same as they were; there were no differences to overcome.

A disappointment, sure, but one that led her to this humbling insight: Without the recognition of genocide, what was left to the Armenians? “Nothing holds us together; we are no longer together at all. Now all possibilities are available to us, and that is terrifying.”